Stephen S. Hudson is an emerging expert on metal music, focusing on fans and musicians’ embodied experiences of rhythm, timbre, and song form.
Stephen S. Hudson is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Occidental College, after previously teaching at Northwestern University (where he received a PhD in Music Theory & Cognition) and the University of Richmond. He is an emerging expert on metal music, focusing on fans and musicians’ embodied experiences of rhythm, timbre, and song form. His first book, titled Heaviness in Metal Music, is currently under contract with Oxford University Press, and he has also received an advance contract for a second book with Lever Press about groove and complexity in the riffs of the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah. He also has articles about metal in recent issues of Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online, and Metal Music Studies, as well as a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition.
Prof. Hudson is also pursuing a secondary research program investigating harmony in R&B and Soul music, including recent presentations national conferences including the Society for Music Theory and Theorizing African American Music, and a new article in Current Musicology about multi-layered chords on songs by the Canadian superstar Drake. In his teaching, Prof. Hudson is committed to developing new teaching approaches that diversify music theory beyond the classical canon and provide more tools for songwriters and producers. Prof. Hudson also has recent or forthcoming book reviews and other short articles in Journal of Music Theory, Intégral, Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, and Metal Music Studies.
He is Vice President of the Pacific Southwest chapter of the American Musicological Society. In his spare time, he enjoys playing classical and baroque cello.